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Tel jour telle nuit, FP86

Introduction

This is by far the most famous of Poulenc’s song cycles—in the same way that Dichterliebe can be said to be the most famous of Schumann’s. Just as that composer’s musical relationship with the poet Heine is perfectly expressed within the sixteen songs of Dichterliebe, Poulenc’s affinity with Éluard is made crystal clear in the nine separate, but musically interconnected mélodies of Tel jour telle nuit, a cycle in the same way that Fauré’s La bonne chanson is a cycle, the last song a summing-up of what has gone before. The work was begun in December 1936 in Noizay and was completed by January 1937 with the first and last songs composed as a matching pair in Lyon. The distinction of the dedicatees show Poulenc’s confidence: Pablo Picasso, Freddy (Fréderique Lebedeff, later the mother of his daughter), Nush (sic) Éluard, Valentine Hugo, Marie-Blanche de Polignac (songs v and vi), Denise Bourdet, Pierre Bernac and Yvonne Gouverné (the choral conductor who introduced almost all of Poulenc’s choral music to the world). How it came to be that the mauvais garçon of French music, the spoiled son of a rich family who had been famous for his insouciance and his Leg Poulenc, found it within himself to voice the quiet radiance, the humility and grandeur, the rapture, the terror, the profound humanity and compassion of this great poet is one of the mysteries of French music. Like Die schöne Müllerin for Schubert, this was a watershed work. In early January 1937 with the first performance only a month away, Poulenc asked the poet for a title for the work (each of the songs had individual titles which the composer declined to use). Éluard supplied a choice of four epithets for the cycle as a whole; his preferred choice was Tout dire, but Poulenc selected his second suggestion, Tel jour telle nuit, which encompasses the contrast between the opening and closing songs.

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Graham Johnson is simply the greatest living authority on French song; an artist whose innate feeling for the music is combined with prodigious scholarship. Following his many wonderful recordings in Hyperion’s French Song Edition, Johnson turns t ...» More

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A good day I have again seen whom I do not forget
whom I shall never forget
And women fleeting by whose eyes
formed for me a hedge of honour
they wrapped themselves in their smiles

A good day I have seen my friends carefree
the men were light in weight
one who passed by
his shadow changed into a mouse
fled into the gutter

I have seen the great wide sky
the beautiful eyes of those deprived of everything
distant shore where no one lands
a good day which began mournfully
dark under the green trees
but which suddenly drenched with dawn
invaded my heart unawares.

There is no introduction; voice and piano embark on this journey, and this ‘journée’, together. Both the poem and song are dedicated to Pablo Picasso; Éluard was probably referring to his visit to Spain in early 1936 to view the first Picasso retrospective exhibitions in Barcelona, Madrid and Bilbao. The piano-writing is ambulatory but calm and even, the piano’s bare oscillating Cs placed two octaves apart. Poulenc has described how the music came to him: walking happily towards the Bastille, he remembered the joyful departures of his childhood by a train ‘in the trees’ (the railway track elevated above street level) to his grandparents’ home at Nogent-sur-Marne. This explains the quintessential Poulenc travelling tempo of crotchet = 63. The vocal melody, ascending in optimism as if to greet the dawn of a wonderful new day, is in C major with a Lydian inflection of F sharp. The music for each of the three verses of the poem begins the same way and then branches off into different harmonic directions. This semi-strophic form lends the song a certain gravity—as if something important and radiant were being proclaimed. The marking Calme is of the utmost significance for there was never music more measured and genial than this, and Poulenc in JdmM specifies ‘peaceful joy’. The last six bars of the vocal line (from ‘Mais qui soudain trempée d’aurore’) blossom at the height of the stave and the high notes of ‘M’entra dans le cœur’ (forte with a diminuendo to piano) suggest, in Bernac’s words, ‘the invasion of the heart by the dawn’. The contained rapture of this extended and noble cadence (incorporating a stately return to the C major of the opening) is breathtaking. The postlude, a simple exploration of a C major triad denuded of its third (C up to G, then to the G below) will reappear at the end of the work. At the last moment the pianist adds the B flat below middle C to turn the final chord, left hanging in the air, into a seventh. This is a ravishing touch that prepares us for the dream-like world of the next song.

If the Apollinaire songs are of earth and water (the feel of the Paris pavement, the sound of the Seine), the Paul Éluard songs are made of fire and air. Indeed it must be admitted that the greatest Apollinaire settings were written only after Poulenc had passed through the refining fire of contact with Éluard’s poetry. 1936 was a pivotal year: one of Poulenc’s friends, the composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud, was killed in a macabre accident; Poulenc was reconverted to catholicism as a result of a mystical experience at the shrine of the Black Virgin of Rocamadour; his song duo with the baritone Pierre Bernac was firmly established; and Éluard became a cherished collaborator in his vocal music. Out of these experiences a more serious and dedicated creator emerged, and in Bernac he had found a serious and dedicated interpreter to give voice to this new idealistic lyricism.

From this time, the cycle Tel jour telle nuit is one of Poulenc’s greatest achievements. Undeterred by superficial difficulties, the composer goes to the heart of Éluard’s texts. The poet’s own experiences (journeys, encounters, friendships, dreams, and above all his love for his wife Nusch) have gone into the making of the poems. Poulenc’s musical interpretation helps to unlock a door: behind it Éluard, the seemingly formidable intellectual, is revealed for what he really was—a poet of the people who sang unstintingly of love, the beauties of nature and the brotherhood of man. The last mélodie in this cycle, Nous avons fait la nuit, is one of the greatest love songs in French music; the poem is but one man’s explication of a relationship, yet, illuminated by Poulenc’s music, it takes on a universal significance and shows a deep understanding of the nature of love itself, and the means of its constant renewal. It is no surprise that the song’s postlude, which is the summing up of the cycle, has a power that recalls the end of a less optimistic but similarly heartfelt cycle, Schumann’s Dichterliebe.

Bernac makes a rare statement about the meaning of an Éluard poem: he imagines that the apron into which the ruin weeps is ‘heavy masses of ivy hanging down the old walls’. He is simply sharing with his students the kind of personalized imagery with which performers, when confronted with this poetry, have to experiment in order to make the texts (and thus the songs) come alive. In Bernac’s own performances there is never any doubt that he ‘understands’ everything of which he sings, or rather that the poetry has imprinted vivid images in his own mind; whatever these may be, they come across to the listener as authoritative. Poulenc creates a dream landscape suspended in time; the dynamics are muted throughout, even the mezzo forte passages are contained within the nocturnal atmosphere. In no song have the hushed mysteries of the midnight hour (‘Il est minuit comme une flèche’) been more eloquently expressed; the addition of the piano’s low C on the second syllable of ‘minuit’, as if a stroke of a tam-tam, provides one of the most spellbinding colours in the composer’s songs. From the beginning of this music the passing of time has been marked by bell-like left-hand crotchets, pricked out from the dreamlike texture; in the extraordinarily beautiful coda left hand crosses right and movement and stasis are inextricably entwined.

A sudden shock, and planned as such, this is one of those songs that Poulenc placed strategically between slower and more profound ones to create a sense of contrast and excitement. There is a harsh and militant side to Éluard, a violence that Poulenc does not try to avoid—this is poetry with a definite angry edge that is expressed in four of the cycle’s songs. This strange and stormy outburst, a love song of sorts, has an inexplicably charming middle section (‘Tout le reste est parfait’) and a peroration (beginning ‘Une nappe d’eau’) which begins ominously and winds down to a graceful resolution in the major key. If performers follow all the directions and perform the song implacably it successfully sets up the drama of the next song.

This poem is slightly easier to understand. Éluard is a poet whose Communism promises and supports Revolution, but whose own tendency is to sympathize with individual cases rather than promulgate theory. The poet understands the power of rage among the have-nots with whom he strongly identifies without being one of them. In the 1930s starvation and untreated illness left many a child orphaned and facing the brutal responsibilities of adulthood alone on the streets; it was to be worse during the war. In this taut melodrama, a single page of music, even the carthorse drawing the wagon is dead. Poulenc’s own image was of a gypsy child on a wagon he saw one late November day in Ménilmontant. The scene is still but ominous, a bleak moonscape where there is nothing to hope for. Both poet and composer also register a brooding sense of danger from the ‘child master’ whose brow is ‘blue with hatred’. The future of a society that permits such a heartless scenario can only be violent. The music ends with a shudder, not of revulsion but self-accusatory.

The outbreak of this mad music (the words suggest an irresistible impetus) is carefully arranged to spring from what has gone before—but it is in itself one of the composer’s ‘trampoline’ songs, meant to clear the air for the calm repose that is needed for Une herbe pauvre, one of the focal points of the cycle. The violin imagery of the poem produces open fifths in a wild danse macabre, and there are two extraordinary jazzy piano interludes that are strangely mirthless—despair is the order of the day, not pleasure. The bars of ‘Les verges de l’ouragan’ have a suitably stormy quality. The B flat minor tonality at this point suggests a link in Poulenc’s mind with the windswept last movement of the Chopin second piano sonata, Op 35, in the same key. In the song’s wild closing moments the piano seems to pursue the vocal line; the two bars of postlude (très violent) are like a trap snapping shut.

This little masterpiece in E minor has a simplicity worthy of the Fauré of Le jardin clos, a composer who announces some of his greatest song masterpieces with opening bars of seemingly innocuous crotchets, the beginning of a magical journey where one harmony yields to the next in a way that is both inevitable and surprising. So it is here. ‘This poem of Éluard has for me a divine savour’, writes Poulenc in JdmM. ‘It recalls for me that invigorating bitterness of a flower I once plucked and tasted in the surroundings of the Grande Chartreuse.’ Lieder enthusiasts will recognize a similar emotion expressed by the poet Kerner in Schumann’s Erstes Grün Op 35 No 4. The melancholy inherent in the poem’s final line (‘Elle était fanée’) colours the sense of resignation in the music—the blade of mountain grass, brave enough to stick its head above the snow, has been withered by cold. Most unusually, the composer repeats the first three lines of Éluard’s poem to round off this haunting elegy in the form of a pavane, as perfect and as simple a song as Poulenc ever wrote.

Poulenc writes in JdmM that this song is ‘to be sung in a single curve, one single impulse’. This seems to have been a corrective to hearing performances that were laboured and which failed to convey the breathless well-being of the words—a mood which must be careful, on the other hand, not to create a sense of agitation (as Bernac warns). Éluard has written, by his standards, an uncomplicated love poem to Nusch and the lyrical élan of the music is a perfect match. There is just a tinge of cabaret in the music, a charming lightness of heart reflected in the accacciatura ornamenting ‘la taille de ma solitude’. In the opening bars the pianist has the sensation of dancing on the black keys in the key of G flat major before sliding down to the white notes for a graceful cadence into F major in the third bar. Poulenc then takes us on a tour of sequences in flat, and then sharp, keys—no doubt carefully and even laboriously composed, harmony by harmony, but somehow adding up to something effortlessly elegant, as if conceived in a single, inspired arch—indeed, the whole song gives that pleasing impression. The last phrase of the song (beginning ‘Et des jours et des nuits) throbs with a mysterious alternation of B flat minor and major; the two-bar postlude has the delicacy of a caress.

This poem has a fierce Rimbaud-like intensity, a frightening vision of considerable grandeur. In JdmM Poulenc wrote that the reason he created a song as loud and active as this was to make the silence of the following song, Nous avons fait la nuit, more effective. This may be, but the gestural power of Figure de force brûlante et farouche has something mystical and powerful in its own right that adds considerable weight to the power of the cycle as a whole—it is as if the spirit of Stravinsky at his most elemental has suddenly appeared as a kind of avenging angel, although whenever Poulenc imitates another composer the music is always refracted through a prism of his own individuality. We hear the ‘Russian’ Stravinsky in the repetitive punched rhythms of the opening and the savagery of ‘Dans un lit jamais partagé’, and the Stravinsky of the Symphony of Psalms in the hieratic slowness of ‘Aux veines des tempes’. In truth, the song is a bit of a ragbag of different effects, but intensity of utterance binds it together. Amidst the lyricism of much of the cycle this is a reminder that Éluard is no miniaturist and mere love poet—his words sometimes require a Picasso-like boldness in setting them to music. The dedication of the song to Pierre Bernac, who was not only Poulenc’s favourite singer but also a kind of moral counsellor, gives pause for thought. Bernac was in many ways a hard-working ascetic with none of the composer’s sybaritic laissez-faire. Is this song perhaps the composer’s subtle critique of Bernac’s formidable and sometimes intractable self-control?

We have made night I hold your hand I watch over you
I sustain you with all my strength
I engrave on a rock the star of your strength
deep furrows where the goodness of your body will germinate
I repeat to myself your secret voice your public voice
I laugh still at the haughty woman
whom you treat like a beggar
at the fools whom you respect the simple folk in whom you immerse yourself
and in my head which gently begins to harmonize with yours with the night
I marvel at the stranger that you become
a stranger resembling you resembling all that I love
which is ever new.

Poulenc regarded this as one of his most moving songs, and few would argue with him. The poem, which comes from Facile where it is printed next to Man Ray’s artfully shaded photograph of Nusch, naked on her back, knees bent, hands and wrists bedecked with jewellery acrobatically touching her feet. And yet this is a poem where eroticism is nourished not by the Kama Sutra but by enduring love and admiration. The poet is continually surprised by Nusch—her thoughts and opinions can never be guessed in advance, she can never be taken for granted. She treats the mighty with contempt and the foolish with respect, she reinvents herself at all times. He marvels at her Protean ability to defy his predictions, to change into something that is always unexpected, always new, ‘toujours nouveau’. This is nothing less than Éluard’s profound analysis of what makes a relationship work, what it is that binds two people together. It is her sheer unpredictability and her generosity of spirit that have kept him fascinated with her over a number of years. The physical nature of the union (the sexual metaphor of ‘Sillons profonds où la bonté de ton corps germera’) is dependent on a profound mental affinity (‘ma tête … se met doucement d’accord avec la tienne’). In setting this great lyric of the uniting and melding of opposites, of Yin and Yang, of man and woman, Poulenc never puts a hand or foot wrong. It is as if he has been lifted and inspired by the kind of relationship that he understands, that he can admire, but can never quite experience himself; this explains, perhaps, the music’s extraordinary poignancy and longing. When this cycle is compared to Dichterliebe it is unassuaged Sehnsucht, wordlessly expressed in both piano postludes, that the two cycles have most in common.

The song begins in C minor with the piano doubling the voice, a tonal analogue, surely, for a couple holding hands in the dark and feeling their way to intimacy; the tempo is as constant as a heartbeat. Gradually the harmonies fill out and become more luminous; at bar 15 the three flats of the key-signature are cancelled into naturals for six bars, essentially a shift into A minor. At bar 22 there is a change from a chord in that key to a second inversion of D flat major, the bass falling a semitone to A flat (on ‘Et dans ma tête’). After this descent into darker harmonic profundity the vocal line, inflected by a bel canto intensity that any Italian composer might admire, moves into another sphere and takes flight. The piano-writing also becomes increasingly demonstrative; the phrase ‘avec la nuit’ occasions a piano chord ornamented with grace notes, a stretch of a tenth on the keyboard which seems a metaphor for one soul reaching, straining to become part of another. For the next eight bars piano and voice are anchored on what is almost a non-stop G pedal. This underscores imagery of anchored devotion, the person singing to Nusch (in other words Éluard himself) transfixed by fascinated admiration for an unknown woman (‘Une inconnue’) who is also the woman he already knows and loves. This pedal-point also sets up a longing for a cadence. On the final syllable of the phrase ‘Qui est toujours nouveau’ the listener is granted this resolution in sumptuous fashion, one of the most satisfying dominant-to-tonic progressions in all song. The thirteen-bar postlude, entirely on the piano’s white keys (a lack of accidentals denoting, perhaps, purity and altruism) is radiantly calm, aglow with a vision of twinned souls that has moved and inspired the composer, but seems sadly out of his own reach. We hear once again those notes from a C major triad that have ended Bonne journée. The cycle has come full circle, and in only twenty-three pages of music Poulenc has joined the ranks of the song-composing immortals.

We have made night I hold your hand I watch over you
I sustain you with all my strength
I engrave on a rock the star of your strength
deep furrows where the goodness of your body will germinate
I repeat to myself your secret voice your public voice
I laugh still at the haughty women
whom you treat like a beggar at the fools
whom you respect the simple folk in whom you immerse yourself
and in my head which gently begins to harmonize with yours with the night
I marvel at the stranger that you become
a stranger resembling you resembling all that I love
which is ever new.

We have made night I hold your
hand I watch over you
I sustain you with all my strength
I engrave on a rock the star of your strength
deep furrows where the goodness of
your body will germinate
I repeat to myself your secret voice
your public voice
I laugh still at the haughty woman
whom you treat like a beggar
at the fools whom you respect the
simple folk in whom you immerse yourself
and in my head which gently begins
to harmonize with yours with the night
I marvel at the stranger that you become
a stranger resembling you resembling
all that I love
which is ever new.